UPDATED!! - Interview with Larry Wall

The original audio file had the final 13 minutes of the interview missing. The link is now updated.

At YAPC::NA 2005 Larry Wall agreed to sit down and talk a little about Perl. It's taken a while, but here is the audio. This one was interesting to record, as we were in the lobby of 89 Chestnut and picked up a bit of background noise. Not to mention, we were recording off of a single unidirectional microphone. Still, I'm pretty sure that it was focused on the right person :)

• Interview Audio
• Larry's (and fam's) spot on the web

Interview with Jesse Vincent

Well, I had to delay the release of my interview with Andy Lester for a few days, so I'm a little late getting out a replacement interview. But, better late then never. For this interview I speak with Jesse Vincent of Best Practical about his ticketing system, RT, and his new book, "RT Essentials".

• Interview Audio


• Best Practical


• RT


• RT Essentials

This one also has a contest announcement inside. Be sure to listen for your chance to win a copy of "RT Essentials".

Interview with Shane Caraveo

At OSCON 2005 I got to interview Shane Caraveo. Shane is a senior developer at ActiveState where he is the technical lead for the Komodo IDE. In the interview, we talk about Komodo and Perl.

Perl News 2005-09-26

Time for another Perl News Summary. Below are the links for the news. Be sure to check back in to catch interviews with Larry Wall, Andy Lester, and Shane Caraveo.

• 3rd Hungarian Perl Workshop


• Review of "Perl Best Practices"


• This Week on perl5-porters


• Perl Lightning Talks at EuroOSCON


• Lisbon Perl Mongers Social Meeting


• The State of the Onion 9

Questions Suggestions for Rocco Caputo

Soon I'll be speaking with Rocco Caputo, the creator and maintainer of POE, a portable multitasking and networking framework for Perl. Here is your chance to pass any questions that you might have on to me.

Adam Kennedy on PPI

Here is another interview recorded at OSCON 2005. This is a talk with Adam Kennedy about PPI, a way to parse, analyze and manipulate Perl without the Perl interpreter.

Perl News 2005-09-14

Oh how time flies by. It's been well over a week and I'm just now getting this out to you. Here is the Perlcast Perl News Summary for this week. The links to all the stories can be found below.

• YAPC::Europe::2006 in Birmingham, UK


• ABE.pm (Lehigh Valley) Meeting


• Nordic Perl Workshop 2005 - Call for papers


• Boston.pm meeting 9/13


• Perlcast: Conway Channel 2005


• Call for Papers, 8th German Perl-Workshop 2006


• Create your own "BackPAN"


• Data Center Day: Before and After


• Data Center Power Outage: Before and After


• Perl Internationalization and Haskell: An Interview with Autrijus Tang

Questions Suggestions for Bio-Perl

Sometime soon I'm going to get to speak with some of the core developers of BioPerl. I'm not exactly who all will be there, so I can't give any specific names now, but hopefully I can get at least a couple of people off of the core contributors list on the phone together. So, once again, it's your turn. Email or post your questions here.

Question Suggestions for Randal Schwartz

Hopefully in the very near future I'll be conducting an interview with Randal Schwartz of Stonehenge. Randal has had his hands in the writing of Learning Perl, Perls of Wisdom, Effective Perl Programming and Learning Perl Objects, References, and Modules. He is also involved in many other aspects of the Perl world. So, here is your chance to have some input on the questions that will be asked. Shoot me an email or leave a comment.

Question Suggestions for Jesse Vincent

Next week I'm going to be talking with Jesse Vincent of Best Practical about RT and the new book that he co-authored, "RT Essentials". So, here is your chance to have some input on the questions that will be asked. Shoot me an email or leave a comment.

Question Suggestions for Andy Lester

This Friday I hope to get to sit down with Andy Lester and conduct an interview. Per request of a listener, I'm taking suggestions on what to ask interviewees. So, now is your chance. What do you want to ask Andy?

For those who don't already know, Andy is a very active member of the Perl community. He is really big into Perl quality assurance, including the Phalanx project. He has authored many modules, including WWW::Mechanize. The list goes on-and-on.

Conway Channel 2005

At the O'Reilly Open Source Convention I was able to record Damian Conway presenting his Conway Channel 2005. In the talk, Damian unleashes a dozen new modules on the Perl community. Listen in to find out more.

Also, here are links to the modules that I noticed that he mentioned.

1. IO::Prompt


2. IO::Busy


3. Log::StdLog


4. Debug::Phases


5. Leading::Zeros


6. Sub::Installer


7. Regexp::MatchContext


8. Contextual::Return


9. Perl6::Export::Attrs


10. Config::Std


11. Getopt::Euclid


12. Perl6::Say


13. Smart::Comments


14. Toolkit

Casey West on JSAN

Recently I had the opportunity to sit down with Casey West and speak with him about JSAN, the JavaScript Archive Network. In the interview, Casey tells us why he started JSAN and how you can help out.

Perl News 2005-09-06

It is time for yet another Perlcast Perl News Summary podcast. This week, the Perl-specific news is a little light, but don't fret. There is quite a bit more Perl content coming out this week including an interview with Casey West about JSAN and a recording of The Conway Channel 2005 from OSCON.

Links for this week's Perl news summary:

• POD Indexing Project


• Toronto Perl Mongers - Audio Archive


• WebGUI Perl Code Execution Vulnerabilities


• Linux Magazine: Learning Perl


• The Perl Job site


• ACM Note on Katrina


• Perl Testing Contest Winners

Perl Testing Contest Winners

Congratulations to the Perl Testing contest winners. The winners were:

1. Len Jaffe of Columbus, Ohio, USA


2. Michael Hendricks of Laramie, Wyoming, USA


3. Peter Stuifzand of Veeningen, The Netherlands


4. Kim Ahlström of Åkersberga, Sweden


5. Veljko Vidovic of Montreal, Quebec, Canada

The questions and answers for each of the contests were:

1. 
   Perl’s documentation suggests using h2xs to create new modules. What module, that Ian and chromatic mention, is just a modern alternative for the h2xs method?
   
   • Module::Starter
   
   


2. 
   What is the full name of the protocol that Perl’s testing tools implement?
   
   • TAP - Test Anything Protocol
   
   


3. 
   Name three other languages that have ports of Perl’s testing tools.
   
   
   
   • Answers included C, Java, JavaScript, PHP, and Python. The Perl Testing authors specifically called out JavaScript, Python, Parrot/PIR, Perl 6, and C. I accepted just about anything... especially if proof was provided.
   
   
   
   


4. 
   What is the name of the project that aims to improve the tests and test coverage in Perl and improve the tests, test coverage and documentation of the CPAN.
   
   • Phalanx
   
   


5. 
   What module from the CPAN would you use to create unit tests?
   
   • PTDN recommends Test::Class, which has the highest (if any) ratings for a unit-testing module. Test::Unit, Test::SimpleUnit, Test::Assertions and Test::Extreme are others that fit the bill. Of course, since I asked which module 'you' would use, I accepted everything as an entry.
     
   
   
   
   

Thanks to chromatic and Ian Langworth for help with the questions.

Perl Testing Contest: Round 5

The time has come for the fifth and final give-away of Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook. You might remember that Perlcast did an interview with Ian Langworth and chromatic, the authors of Perl Testing, a month or so ago.

This final contest will take the form of a question. Answers should be emailed to perlcast at gmail dot com. Entries will be accepted for 24 hours following the contest posting. Everyone with a correct answer will be entered into a drawing to be held soon after each days submission deadline.

Here is todays question:

What module from the CPAN would you use to create unit tests?

Good luck and thanks for listening.

Perl Testing Contest: Round 4

A little late, but it is finally time for the fourth give-away of Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook. You might remember that Perlcast did an interview with Ian Langworth and chromatic, the authors of Perl Testing, a month or so ago.

For the next two days, we will be holding a contest for a copy of Perl Testing. Each contest will take the form of a question. Answers should be emailed to perlcast at gmail dot com. Entries will be accepted for 24 hours following each contest posting. Everyone with a correct answer will be entered into a drawing to be held soon after each days submission deadline.

Here is todays question:

What is the name of the project that aims to improve the tests and test coverage in Perl and improve the tests, test coverage and documentation of the CPAN.

Good luck and thanks for listening.